BEST BOOKS ON... MAY DAYS
AND so, at last, we have arrived at May. For me, it is a toss-up between May and June as to which is the best month to be o on these British Isles.
June wins on days’ length and that languidly hap happy feeling of summer stretching itse itself out to warm bones. But May offers offer budding promise and fresh green greenness. It is a time of bounty — asp asparagus, strawberries — and the first firsst truly warm days.
They always seem a kind of miracle, those first days of heat and cloudless sky. On one, we meet the irrepressible Pop Larkin and his brood in H.E. Bates’s The Darling Buds Of May.
In ‘strong May sunlight, the first hot sun of the year,’ they are driving homewards through the Kent countryside. All about them, nature abounds: ‘ In perfect sunlight, between orchards that lifted gentle pink branches in the lightest breath of wind, the truck was passing strawberry fields.’
Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The d’Urbervilles begins on the day o of Marlott village’s all-female May Maydance dance ‘club-walking’. The seeds of o Tess’s tragedy are sewn then then. But i in another Hardy classic, The Return Of The Native, the May festivities come towards the novel’s end, and signpost recovery and renewal.
The widowed Thomasin sees the Maypole being erected out of her window and ‘was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.’ She dresses in summer finery in the hope of seeing Diggory Venn.
Over the past fortnight, after a year of letting dust gather, I have felt moved to get my house in order. Like Mole in the opening pages of The Wind In The Willows, I have been busily tidying, cleaning, sorting.
All very laudable, but Mole’s adventures begin when he declares: ‘Hang spring-cleaning’, and snouts his way up to the sunlight. ‘The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout.’
Does that description of seeking out fresh air and freedom after too long indoors strike a chord? I hope these May days offer us all a chance to play (safely) in the sunshine.